Microsoft today revealed a new installation process in which Windows can be installed to save storage on the disk. This new instillation process was added with Windows 8.1 Update and it allows devices with 16GB or 32GB SSDs or eMMC storage to have plenty of storage left for apps and data after Windows is installed. This new deployment option is called Windows Image Boot (or WIMBoot). Instead of extracting all the individual Windows files from an image (WIM) file, they remain compressed in the WIM. But from the user’s perspective, nothing looks any different: You still see a C: volume containing Windows, your apps, and all of your data. How much does this process save on storage? So let’s assume the WIM file (INSTALL.WIM) is around 3GB and you are using a 16GB SSD. In that configuration, you’ll still be left with over 12GB of free disk space (after subtracting out the size of the WIM and a little bit of additional “overhead”). And the same WIM file (which...

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